Tea partiers push back after bad week

SEARCHLIGHT, Nev. — If tea party activists were disheartened or skittish after first losing their battle to stop the Democratic health care overhaul and then being blamed for fueling harassment of the bill’s supporters, it was not apparent Saturday at the first major rally since President Barack Obama signed the health care bill into law.

The thousands of activists gathered in a dusty wind-swept desert lot a few miles north of Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid’s tiny hometown were boisterous in their denunciations of Obama and congressional Democrats — as well as the hated mainstream media they believe unfairly linked them to the harassment — and ambitious in their goals for the 2010 congressional midterm elections.

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The rally featured plenty of enmity toward Reid, including one sign declaring one of the porta-potties a “Harry Reid Think Tank” and another urging voters to “Bury Harry Reid in November,” as well as heaping helpings of standard tea party rhetoric declaring Obama a socialist, Marxist or Communist, and the typical prevalence of yellow flags derivative of the Culpepper Minutemen banner featuring a rattlesnake and the phrase "Don't Tread on Me."

There also, however, appeared to be a heightened sensitivity toward the intense media coverage accorded the rash of threats and vandalism targeting Democratic House members who supported the health care overhaul legislation that passed last week — and especially suggestions those outbursts may have been encouraged by the inflammatory rhetoric used by tea partiers and other conservative critics of the plan, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Tea party leaders condemned the harassment during the week, but at the Searchlight rally, attendees emphasized that there’s been no evidence linking tea partiers to the harassment, which ranged from a broken congressional office window to a severed gas line at the home of a congressman’s brother to death threats against a lawmaker who brokered a key deal that paved the way for passage.

“When we talk about fighting for our country, let’s clear the air right now about what it is that we’re talking about,” Palin told the crowd in the rally’s keynote address. “We’re not inciting violence. Don’t get sucked into the lame-stream media’s lies about ... Americans standing up for freedom as inciting violence. Violence isn’t the answer. It’s a bunch of bunk that the media is trying to feed you.”

Conservative talk show host Mark Williams, an official with the political action committee that sponsored the rally, rejected media reports of slurs directed at House Democrats during tea party rallies in Washington before Sunday’s vote, which were based on first-hand accounts from reporters and members of Congress.

“That’s a crock,” he said, alleging that when his group’s buses — emblazoned with “Tea Party Express” — drove down Searchlight’s main street, they were pelted with eggs by Reid supporters, who lined the sidewalks waving mass-produced placards saying “Welcome to Reid Country.”

Williams declared “Thuggery is a left-wing tactic. We denounce it. We will not stand for it.”

On the homepage of the Big Government site of Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, who spoke at the rally, a headline reads: “Harry Reid Supporters Attack Tea Party Bus! ... Update: Breitbart Attacked!”